Т Паркер - The Room of White Fire

We left the pool area. Evan took one of the gravel pathways around the main building, then another across a big sloping lawn on the eastern side. He walked slowly, bent at the waist, with his hands held loosely behind his back. A white-clad attendant trailed us a hundred feet back, gave me a brief salute when I turned.

“Explain your presence here,” he said, more to the path than to me.

I told him my profession and that I’d been hired to find Clay Hickman.

“I sensed that he would do this,” said Evan. “Clay is utterly tormented by the ghosts of the war. I sensed an awakening in him over the last few months. He told me he had a mission. He wants to bring ‘white fire to Deimos.’ Deimos, you may not know, is the Greek god of terror, but it’s also a nickname for someone Clay knew in the war. Do not look up now but there is a camera in the jack pine coming up on our left, twenty feet up, right side, near the trunk. Where the branches are trimmed. You can’t even see all the mics. Be silent as we go by.”

When we came to the tree I looked anyway, and saw a small video camera strapped to a truncated branch. When the path forked just past the camera tree, Evan went left, west into the forest.

“I wasn’t able to unravel his metaphor,” he said, glancing at me. “I see no relevance between Deimos and Clay and white fire, whatever that might be. Clay insisted that he has friends to help him. I heard that he slipped past his guards before lunch, threw a blanket over the razor wire, and climbed over. Is that true?”

Do you tell the truth to a crazy man in a crazy place? Will it make him free, or are you inviting harm to him and others? I thought about that and said nothing.

“If you don’t tell me the truth I can’t help you find him.”

“He dug out,” I said quietly, facing down. I realized how suddenly and easily I’d entered his world.

“Did his friends help him?”

“I don’t think so.”

We walked deeper into the forest, which I noted, upon this second tour, was cleared of brush and saplings. There was no thick bed of pine needles as an authentic forest would have, no fallen trunks or drying branches, no tangles of old growth or dead limbs. I saw that most of the trees had been laced so they were balanced and attractive and nonwild looking. Arcadia, I thought. A region of ancient Greece known as a place of simple pleasure and pastoral quiet .

I looked back at our keeper, still a hundred feet behind us, now with a phone to his head. Deeper in, the forest was less groomed, darker. We came to the firebreak and the chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire, maybe two hundred yards from the escape hole that curious Sequoia Blain from Oregon had helped Clay dig. I hadn’t seen a camera along the last hundred yards of trail, and saw none on the fence. Maybe DeMaris’s security team figured they were too expensive to install this far out. Large and heavily wooded, the Arcadia grounds would be very difficult to fully secure without towers and guards.

“See that hummingbird hovering over the razor wire?” asked Evan. “It’s not a hummingbird. It’s a surveillance drone. They send information from sensors in their eyes back to the main computer in the security room.”

I looked up. The tiny bird was whirring in place as hummingbirds do, maybe twenty feet away from where we stood, near the top of the razor wire. A male, by the bright, metallic-red blazes on his head. Evan Southern’s magnified blue eyes were excited and calculating. He seemed to be waiting on a decision from me.

“Who told you that?” I asked him.

“Everyone knows. Just climb up there and scare it off and you’ll see it’s a drone by the way it flies.”

“Why don’t you climb up and see what it does?”

“Because I already know what it will do.”

It sounded logical and doable enough. The worst that could happen was I’d climb up part of the fence, scare off a hummingbird, and have a lunatic down on the ground laughing at me. I turned and looked at our escort again. He’d stopped his usual hundred feet away, crossed his arms, and now stood watching us. I found a rock and lobbed it up near the hummingbird.

The bird didn’t dodge it. So I got a big pinecone and arched it closer, just a couple of yards from the bird, more than close enough to scare most hummingbirds I’d seen. The bird moved slightly. I looked back at our guard.

“He won’t mind,” said Evan. “Mickey is an Alabama gentleman, like myself.”

The fence was the good-quality chain-link, with rubberized black coating, which would be easy on the skin. I spread my hands and legs, got my fingers and toes set, then began pulling and toeing my way up to the bird. Halfway there it flew off. I clung there mid-fence, craning my neck to watch it disappear into the trees behind me. It didn’t make the usual low thrum of a hummingbird, but rather a high-pitched whirr. And it didn’t fly in swift, bottom-heavy swoops like hummingbirds do, but in a straight line. Its wings looked weird. It was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen. I lowered myself a foot or two, pushed off, and landed with a puff of dust.

I waved at the guard. He shook his head slowly.

“See?” asked Evan.

“I saw.”

“I can let you examine one later if they haven’t found it yet.”

“You caught one?”

“Two. They found the first one in my room but I put the second one in a much tougher place to find. I do love hiding things from these people. It’s one of the little pleasures of captivity.”

“Why did you bring me all the way out here?”

“The farther you get from the hospital the less surveillance. That is why. And because I wanted to tell you that before Clay came to Arcadia, his very favorite place in San Diego was the Waterfront Bar and Grill. I’m sure you know of it. He went there often when he returned from Romania.”

“He was in Iraq.”

“No. Romania. Somewhere in that dark and humble country, home to vampirism and werewolfery, lie the seeds of Clay’s madness. I think you might actually locate him at the Waterfront.”

“Thank you. I appreciate your help.”

“If you have anything to ask me, especially if it’s secret or very serious, you should do it now, away from the cameras and mics and surveillance drones.”

“Did he tell you where he was going?”

“No, only that he had the mission.”

“Was Clay given electroshock therapy here?”

Evan fixed me with a stare from behind his thick lenses. There was nothing playful in him now as there had been when he challenged me to climb the fence. Instead, there was something frightened. “I’m certain of it. Without his informed consent. They will deny it.” He seemed ready to add something, but did not. “The Waterfront, Mr. Ford. The Waterfront is the best lead I can give you.”

We stood in awkward silence, both looking back at Mickey, our overseer, as the hummingbird motored back into view, stopped and hovered above us, then whirred off into the forest again.

“Let’s head back, Mr. Ford. I want to show you the art studio.”

We were still in the trees when we came upon three all-white-clad orderlies looking up into a large sycamore with low-hanging branches. Halfway up a young man was crouched in the crook of two branches. He had something in his hands, a phone maybe, or a remote control. One of the orderlies, a thin black man, called up to the man in the tree, asking him to come down safely and right now.

“That’s Remsen,” said Evan. “They blame the drones on him and his friends. Handy, don’t you think?”

The art studio was a big room on the first floor. The entire north-facing wall was solid glass. There was only one artist at work when we walked in, a woman standing at a high table, forming a pot with her hands. She looked from the pot to us, a gray slurry dripping off her wrists, then dropped her attention back to her vessel. Easels stood throughout the room, some holding works in progress, others empty.